A short guide to secure accounts

A secure password goes a long way towards securing your accounts on the internet and avoiding others to do things to and with your accounts you in all likelihood wouldn't be ok with.

Many experts, for quite a while, were convinced that diversity in passwords is key. Well, that is certainly not wrong, however, the one sure-fire way to make your password secure is to make it a really long one. The longer your password is the more secure it is.

If you're afraid you won't be able to memorize a long password or the platform/website/game/tool doesn't allow long passwords you have to add different layers of security which means: if your password can't be long, make it more diverse. To that end, adding a variety of numbers and special chars increase your password's strength as well as alternating lower- and uppercase characters.

One way of coming up with a good password you can remember is to build a simple sentence. For example:

There are 4 files attached to this very long EMail.

This sentence is definitely easy to remember and it contains everything we need: uppercase and lowercase characters, a number, a special char and even spaces. This would be a fairly secure password. If the platform/website/game doesn't allow for this kind of password you can use the same sentence but only use the first letter of each word; the password would then be Ta4fattvlE. which could definitely be improved upon, but it's a good start. IF this is the method you'd go for, make sure to come up with a sentence that doesn't contain too many words that start with the same letter.

In general this is something you also need to pay attention to: too much repetition is bad, as consecutive characters make bruteforcing a password easier.

As important as its diversity and strength are for a password's safety, the best password doesn't help if your treating it carelessly. You should never share your login data with anyone. Not even with support. Support doesn't need your password to check out things or help you. Your account is yours. You should keep it that way.

Also you should not use the same set of login credentials on different websites/platforms/games. Always alternate parts of it so that if one of your sets of credentials is compromised the others may remain somewhat secured.

If your problem is actually remembering passwords you could consider using a password database, the ones most commonly known would probably be KeePass and Dashlane. Here you only have to remember one master password and all other passwords and login credentials are stored in the database.